Saturday, March 31, 2018

Here I am sleeping in, semi-conscious, thinking big
thoughts. I’m closer than ever before to the grand idea, the supreme
connectivity, the metaphor that explains everything. I’m almost there. I can see
it. But just when I’m ready to grasp the damn thing I move up into a more wakeful
state and it’s gone. I’m left with the image of my favorite shirt.

This is no ordinary shirt. It is a work of art. I
could hang it over the couch even if it clashes with the throw pillows. I don’t
wear it very often because I don’t want to show off. It would be like Vincent
wearing his Starry Night. The shirt is mysterious. It is a galaxy as yet
undiscovered. Witnesses have passed out just looking at it. It is the answer to
the question as yet not asked.

Apparel, advised Polonius, doth oft proclaim the man. So I wear
this shirt sparingly not sure that I have the credentials to be the bearer of
the Big Idea. How can I describe the greatest shirt in the history of shirts?
It is deep chocolate as in dark matter with streaks of burnt sienna and celestial beige with random fires of terrestrial orange. It is soil and motion.
Rust and forest. Rufous-sided towhees in flight. The ancient sun and apricot moon.
It is asymmetrical blotches of autumn foliage. Sycamore divas singing their descent. Shakespeare spotted
it and declared, Motley is the only wear.

When I wear my motley shirt I really don’t get to see
it. Maybe that’s the way it should be. We are each other’s big idea. Everything
can be found in anything. There are portals, for some, in their oatmeal. The
Big Idea doesn’t hold still for a minute. Nothing moves faster than a fleeting
insight. The harder you look for it the more futile the search.

In his novel, Satin
Island, Tom McCarthy creates a character looking to tie together disparate
images in his head. The hub city, Turin, or it could be Atlanta or Chicago, is
compared to a parachute in its configuration. When he sees a news flash of a
sky diver whose chute failed to open it becomes the dysfunctional hub city
whose flights are delayed. So it is that everything is seen with new eyes from
oil spills to out-of-control cancer despoiling the ecosystem.

My habit is to seek out transcendent positions. I live in mid-perch looking for patterns, not too far away to be caught in the static but
not altogether stuck in the muck. Maybe my shirt is half muck and half mist.
The Big Idea is sculpted from the marble of small earthy particles.

We live in a time that cries out for a larger frame
of reference. Otherwise we’ve been Trumped. I turn to the sweep of History to
explain the phenomena. How to locate this blip, this aberration …or is it?
Maybe the answer lies in the fear and rage he stoked and the human frailty to be suckered, to abdicate
our autonomy and be led by a hollow man of overwhelming promises and audacity.
My shirt gives me an aesthetic lift but that’s not enough to save us from the
menace of the man.

Where are you Steven Hawking to explain our predicament,
this Small Bang, this deposit of human debris and orbital retrograde?

Monday, March 26, 2018

There we were at the
restaurant. He was on the tip of our tongues. We had his face but no name. Our
smart phones were of no help. He was one of those bit players in 1930s, 40s,
and 50s movies. A character actor. Not even a second banana or a third. Now his
name came to me, Lane. But no first name and no movie because he’d been in
seemingly every movie.

I went home and got it:
Charlie Lane. It turns out he’d played in 250 films and hundreds of T.V. shows. Usually a grumpy, no-nonsense sort of guy. He actually lived to 102
with a career spanning seven decades. In a three year period in the 1940’s he was
in 67 movies dashing from set to set probably with just a few lines in more or less the same
role and often uncredited.

Lane was one of dozens of
familiar faces we almost expected to see for a few minutes in every movie as if
they created a part for him. Others included Andy Devine in cowboy movies, Jane
Darwell (mother-earth), Franklin Pangborn (hotel concierge or
floorwalker), Eugene Pallette (oversized C.E.O.), C.Z. Sakall (with the cuddly
cheeks) and Arthur Treacher (always a butler), to name just a few. The last two moved
up a notch as recognizable names at the time. Former stars in the Silent Film
era who couldn’t make it in Talkies also got their licks in this category of
familiar unknowns.

Each studio had its stable
of Second Fiddles, Sidekicks or Second Bananas. Just as comedians like Burns and Allen or Abbott and Costello had their foils, leading men and women had their lessors. These included names like Donald
O’Connor, Jack Okie, Zazu Pitts, June Allyson and Agnes Moorhead. They could be
the girl next door or the guy from the other side of the tracks, always around so
the star didn’t suffer by comparison. The Second Banana would lose his love
only to be paired up with a Second Banana(ette) who was secretly in love with
him all along waiting for the phone to ring. Off would go the glasses and suddenly she was cute or perky. Second Banana guys went off in
the sunset with Second Banana gals as if some caste system ruled and everybody knew their place. But Bananas were closer to the marque than mere Bits
and a few made it to top Banana.

I’m thinking of Ralph
Bellamy who got snubbed by Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, my favorite movie of that period. He later came
back strong with his portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello. Of course who could blame Russell falling
for the irresistible Cary Grant. Stars like Gable or Grant needed Second
Bananas who couldn’t quite or never would have that je ne sais quoi or weren’t suave and debonair or fast enough with the
repartee.

Bananas, you could love;
Bits you’d adore. As a kid Isaw them
as ever-present faces the way a distant relative would regularly show up for
family functions. They made the world seem reliable. They were often eccentric.
They gave me permission to be weird or qoofy at a time when conformity and
anonymity was my default position. If I couldn’t identify with the Bananas at
least there were always the Bits.

In a great scene in Casablanca
when a table of German soldiers sing Deutschland
Uber Alles it is followed immediately by the entire café bursting out with Le Marseilles. In fact these were mostly
Jewish character actors exiled from Europe… even the ones in Nazi uniforms. Of course
the second Bananas were the team of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet who
followed Bogey from The Maltese Falcon.

In the hierarchy of the
studio system the only thing lower than Bit players was probably Extras. In hard times at least it meant
a free meal for the day. They were needed for crowd scenes or C.B. DeMille’s
cast of thousands. Nowadays they’ve been replaced by the magic of computer
generating. Somewhere on this ladder is the cameo appearance which is an on-screen flash of a name actor the way Alfred Hitchcock got in front of the camera for an instant in most of his films.

It’s a good thing we don’t
get to see the movie of our life before we live it, or even the coming
attractions. Then we’d know our fate by the billing alone and the rest of it
might not be worth the price of admission. However I’d like to think each of us
is Top Banana in our own movie, the one we are living, angst and all, doing battle
with evil and ultimately heroic and blessed.Fifty years ago, in between films, Charlie Lane appeared in a reading of The Trojan Women along with Peggy at the Jung Institute. He told her she could have a career on the stage. No Bits or Bananas were they.

Saturday, March 24, 2018

I’m told by friends, who don’t want to hurt my
feelings, that they enjoy my blogs…. except for those about baseball. Of course
I sympathize with their impoverishment and must also take up the challenge in
remedial education.

Many great poets and writers have embraced the game.
Among them are May Swenson, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Marianne
Moore, Donald Hall, Jack Spicer and Shakespeare. I just threw him in to see if
you were paying attention.

To turn away from baseball is to reject your
ancestry. Rumors have it that early man broke off a branch and swatted away an
approaching rock thus giving birth to the rudiments of the game. The wood became
a natural extension of an arm and the incoming missile could be the moon or any
spherical celestial object. Perhaps it was the paradigm for our space program. When
running, throwing, and catching were no longer necessary for survival they died
as essential tools and became an art form or sport.

I can see this was too much of a stretch. It didn’t
even convince me. Let me try again.

As if ordained by the gods themselves and brought
down from Mt. Olympus baseball celebrates Euclidian geometry. It turns a square
into a diamond punctuated with three pillows, as safe stations, and a
metaphoric home. The navigation around the bases is a hero’s journey,
Odysseus-like. When home plate is finally achieved it is often accompanied by a
cloud of dust to signify the arduous circumstances, with a god-like umpire
passing judgement. Perhaps Zeus took pleasure in watching men fail. Sisyphus
was not alone in futility. Baseball is so designed to reward a seventy percent
failure rate with millions of gold pieces. Add to this the amazing correspondence
of nine innings to our allotted decades on earth, with an allowance for extra
innings here and there.

Still not persuaded? Let me put it this way.

Can you hear it? The crack of the bat. The twack of
ball into mitt. The smell of green grass and hot dogs. Baseball is so pastoral, so American, so
deliberate and so inconsequential. Games will be won and lost setting fans in
anguish or jubilation yet nothing will be really changed. Trump is still with
us, the polar ice continues to melt and the NRA still supports weapons of mass destruction. But here’s what changes: From Opening Day on Thursday to sometime in
late October a human drama will unfold without script. It is neither rigged nor
predictable. An alternative narrative is enacted in real time which makes more
sense than this one we gnash our teeth over listening to Cable News. The game
of baseball offers the illusion, at least, of order, strategy and control. Every
stance and swing will be scrutinized and the mountain of verifiable stats may
not amount to a hill of beans for the uninitiated but to us the fan(atics) it
is its own universe, a ritualized life and death, only to live again the next
day regardless.

The game allows men of all sizes and shapes, beer
bellies, hulks and shrimps, cerebral and instinctual. It attracts physically endowed
jocks and bespectacled nerds. Harvard graduates are now general managers of
several teams trying to outwit their counterparts with new data yet the core of
the sport is an unquantifiable human element. What is more mysterious than a
sudden slump or streak? Even the dimensions of the playing field are inscrutable
with the precision of an infield contrasted with haphazard measurements of the
outfield. All of which add to the bafflement of each nine innings.

Baseball is our answer to the impermanence of life.
It defines our seasons. There is an intimacy between pitcher and catcher in a
shared fluency of silent gestures. Players are widely positioned spatially with
anticipation coiled in their legs to dart at the instant of contact between
ball and bat. And all this time the poet watches in the stands with time to ponder
how life, itself, is simulated on the field.

Finally I am left with the nagging realization that I
am really trying to understand why it is that I still care. The Bible says to
put away childish things so I put away the Bible. At my age there is no
messianic urge to convert the heathens. Only Peggy has the irrational
exuberance to take on the game, as she has, late in life. Otherwise
rationalization is as hopeless as hitting a 100 mph fastball.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Ben was an old man by then but he showed up. Jimmy
did most of the writing. Tom was in France. Al had a lot of input and Jack weighed in also. We were not yet a nation.

Jimmy Madison rose above his station as a
slave-holder. He had a vision beyond the former Articles of Confederation.
Along with Al Hamilton they knew the country wouldn’t hold together as thirteen
separate states. Tom Jefferson along with his fellow plantation owners George
W. and Jimmy Monroe left it for Shorty Madison to forge out some compromise with Northerners
like Alexander H., Jack (John) Adams and Ben Franklin.

They were all products of the European Enlightenment.
They saw a way past monarchy. It was an experiment called Democracy. They didn’t
quite trust the people to directly elect their own representatives. Not those
in bondage, nor those whose land they stole, nor women, nor the un-propertied. Just as they were fearful of a king so were
they afraid of a mobocracy.

They also put in place checks and balances to ensure
that each branch of government could not abuse the powers stipulated. Our Founders knew
enough about potential czars, monarchs and assorted potentates to guard against
that eventuality. In fact four of our first five presidents had no male heir to
create even the appearance of a dynasty. Only John Adams had a son and, sure
enough, he went into the family business.

At 5 ft. 4 inches was James Madison tall enough to see 230 years into the future and imagine a Donald Trump who would rule supreme as dictator if he
could? Are the separation of powers sufficient to withstand the assault on our Constitution?

The months ahead shall be a test whether this
experiment in government can endure against the reckless megalomania of the man
in the tower. Only a handful of Republican voices can be heard to warn against
his abuse of power…and most of those are on their way out the door as they
speak. The great majority of Congress have duct tape over their mouths and
conscience. They have turned a blind eye toward the White House having made a Faustian pact with their clients who feed at the trough of the Koch Brothers, evangelicals, Wall St. and the NRA.

Will Mueller be dismissed while still hot on his trail and closing in? It remains to be seen if the president's handlers can control his early morning tantrums. The chattering class smells
Nixon. The flattering class cowers at the emotional impulse of the man in the Oval. The Senate and House will take a look at the litmus paper to determine if he’s a
plus or a minus in November.

Thanks to the eternal ingenuity of Ben Franklin, Jimmy and Al and the rest of our Fathers are tuned to the podcasts and watching with smart phones from their graves. After 230 years this beautiful conception will be put to the test. They are holding their collective, posthumous breaths to see whether their model will hold given the actor now on stage. They may be thinking of an eleventh amendment.

Friday, March 16, 2018

It happens to me every year at this time. I get to be
older by one. Soon I’ll have reached my Federico Fellini number, 8 ½, in terms of
decades. There are times when it all feels surreal and I welcome the bizarre
and berserk, but for the most part my feet remain on the ground, at the ready
for buoyancy.

More and more do numbers mean less and less.
Calendars are the supreme fiction. There were times in my thirties when I was
in my sixties. My delayed adolescence happened mostly in my late forties and
seems still to be happening. Maturation is devoutly to be ignored… unless it
gets me a discount at the dry cleaner.

There was a time when Peggy was 21 and I was 9. It
was 1942. The war was underway and there were few men around. I would have been
of no use to her. Over the better part of a century I have become older than
her (she). And then younger again. And then the same. And then who cares?

I could swear the vernal equinox use to be my
birthday. But in recent years the calendar has proclaimed it to be the 20th.
So I arrived the day after. Close enough to claim credit, since no one is
around to fact-check, for the sun’s movement across the equator from the
southern to northern hemisphere. Astrologically speaking, a language in which I
have no fluency, I have lived my life on the cusp. Part ram (Aries), part fish
(Pisces). I’ll settle for amphibian, half in, half out of water, and take my
chances. Maybe the cusp has granted me a view from the bridge with an
occasional glimpse into the beyond… or is it the abyss?

I consider myself a lucky guy. If life is a nearly
indecipherable epic poem I met Peggy in mid-stanza, in the turn of the sonnet
or in a prolonged heroic couplet. Her irrepressible spirit lifts me. Her unfathomable soul feeds mine.

We muse each other without trespassing on each other's inner world. Every mishegoss is mulch. Out of an unspoken knowing our intimacy grows. There is a mystery at the core I wish never to know.

Shakespeare has Jaques say in As You Like It, Every day we
ripe and ripe and every day we rot and rot. It may well be true
anatomically. Who knows what plots are being hatched by my entrails as well as
my skin, hair, eyes and ears. All my body parts are original, nothing made in Hong Kong but all out of warranty. I’m unaware of any rotting in the nerve
center. In fact there is an occasional ripening in terms of what I seem to be
hearing and seeing for the first time, an appreciation of what has been there
all along.

In many ways I’m late to the party. It took me all
these years to appreciate patterns in dead leaves, pods outside our window. New is getting lost inside a Coltrane solo and then being found. New is learning to cook crusted salmon. It is a smattering of Greek drama, learning the language of ballet, even the grace of umpires in anticipation on a baseball diamond. Though my
eyesight may be failing and hearing is somewhat diminished, there is still what
e.e. cummings felt in the leaping greenly
spirit of trees / gay, great happening illimitably earth. / Now the ears of my
ears are awake and the eyes of my eyes are opened.

Sunday, March 11, 2018

The West Wing has its own
climate. The forecast is dark clouds with storm warnings, temblors and cyclonic
activity. All fake, the Denier-in-Chief says. There is no collusion, no women, no
Stormy. Yet Lena Horne is back on a forever stamp. Sing it again, Lena. We know why there’s stormy weather in the Oval.
Ain’t no sun up in that sky when money
talks and is hushed no more. The door is revolving seismically. He wants a
parade. Here’s your parade… lawyers and loyalists, generals, trusted soldiers,
advisers, chiefs of staff, campaign chairman are marching. Last one out, turn
off the lights. Victims are suing. Lackeys are squealing. Keeps raining all the time. Tantrums, leaking. Swamps, rising. Tornadoes
spinning. He wants a wall. Give him a piece of wall. Walls crumble in a quake. Our
Founding Fathers are rumbling in their grave. Reporters have scoops. Every ten minutes news breaks the Richter scale.
Heads roll. Soft porn is hard news.

The investigator
is closing in, hot on the trail following bread-crumbs of cash from
you-know-where to you-know-whom to the room where it happened. The Tower is
surrounded by SWAT. Come out with your hands up. I saw this movie. It can only
end badly for the Head of the Family.

Or will it be the porn
that brings him down. Two channels are talking blackmail, slush-funds, Kushner,
hashtags and abusers. The other is still about lost emails, Benghazi and Obama-bashing. Lena is singing as the curtain goes down, Can’t go on / All I have in life is gone / Stormy weather.She’s on the stamp. Donald’s on the
stump. Stormy’s on the brink. Keeps
rainin’ all the time.

Meanwhile on the other
side of town, by the Tidal Basin where M.L. King, FDR and Jefferson are
memorialized and where this Prez has probably never been… Japanese cherry trees will
be coming into full bloom in a few days. They were originally a gift from
Japan for T. Roosevelt’s negotiation of the Russo-Japanese War. The first batch
of 2,000 sent in 1909 were found to be infested but the mayor of Tokyo
persisted and a new shipment of 3,000 arrived three years later. After Hiroshima
we sent saplings to Japan when their parent trees were ailing.

We need these pink blossoms more than ever as a reminder of saner times. We need them to restorebeauty and
calm back into our lives... so close and so far away from the circus across the
divide. After the nuclear disaster at Fukushima a one thousand year-old cherry
tree just thirty miles away from the site was found to be intact; the
suggestion of how vigorous the force to persevere.

Thursday, March 8, 2018

There won’t be many 73rd, 74th or 75th
birthdays celebrated this year. The birth rate was very low during 1943,1944 and 1945. Unless, of course, your father had flat feet, punctured eardrum or (as in
Donald Trump’s case) bone spurs in his heel. (That is the last I’ll say on this subject.) Those of us in our late 70s, 80s or 90s are the privileged ones. We
not only were eye-witnesses to the war-time era of good-feeling, that we were
in it together from a distance (war bonds, paper-drives) but many of us remember the
bittersweet Depression and a few, like Peggy, felt the plunge of the stock
market in 1929, four days after her mother's death left her an orphan.

I say, privileged, because there is another less
noted but more pervasive presence which dominated our lives, sublimally. We were raised by
radio. Every house had one or two, portable or floor console, which became the
centerpiece for family gatherings. We would stare into the speaker as if it
were a T.V. screen. Some of us found an entire canvas in that usually ornate
box.

Interesting how the two dominating figures of the century arrived together. Both understood the power of the mike and may not have been leaders if television prevailed rather than radio.

Radio was tribal. It struck a chord like a distant drum. It created a kinship of like minds. Hitler had his tent. He could have spoken gibberish and often did. Nobody used the new medium to greater advantage outside of Europe than Franklin Roosevelt. He could have recited the Bronx telephone directory, but didn't. It was his intonation that was so God-like. His fireside chats were major events which numbered only thirty
in his 4,422 days in office yet they seemed to resonate far beyond their actual
delivery. The first was delivered 9 days before I entered this world and somehow reached me in that embryonic sea. FDR spoke as if directly to each ear in the room. Some were appeals
for support since most newspapers were operated by staunch Republicans. Others
were assurances we would get through the ordeal. His audience was as much as 61.5 million people during the war years.

Movies were our visual source and radio exercised our
auditory sense. We relied on what we heard. The voice from the box developed our
muscle of imagination. We believed that the mouth of ventriloquist, Edgar
Bergen, didn’t move when he became Charlie McCarthy. We could even picture a beauty pageant if they broadcast one. I could listen to Dodger games and see
the entire ballpark.

When T.V. entered our lives a faculty in our
sensory apparatus was replaced. Nixon was twice elected Vice President by radio and defeated by Kennedy because now we could see him squirming, sweating and his five o'clock shadow. It took him another eight years to learn how to fake authenticity for the camera.According to Marshall McLuhan radio had the effect of fostering communal societies such as Communism and Fascism. Before radio we were a visual culture relying on print technology and the result was Individualism. Even in the U.S. the shared experience of radio brought us together in ways we haven't seen since. Some of us remember the Joe Louis - Max Schmeling heavyweight fights in the 1930's. The rematch drew the largest radio audience in history of 70 million.The more television became technologically perfected the
less participation was demanded of us. When black and white screens yielded to
color I was disabused of my belief that grass was gray….only kidding. But
higher definition has made the small screen almost undifferentiated from
movies.

The computer and, by extension, mobile devices have
provided a visual immediacy which replaces a need for memory. With speed dialing
our need to remember phone numbers or birthdays has taken a hit. Rote
memorization of basic arithmetic is no longer essential. It’s all there at our
fingertips. Smart phones are a haptic (touch) experience, tactile and less linear
sequential. The way of reading today is a total field approach using ideograms and
emoji. We read as much but we are no longer bookish. Even literary fiction is
fractured, less plot-driven and often about an observation of the observer.

McLuhan predicted a global village fifty years ago
though he never quite imagined the Internet. He made the case that the particular media
itself is the message, more so than the content it carries. For the most part we
are unaware of what’s happening to us. Technology can eat us alive or we can
worship it… or any stop in between. It operates unremarked upon but profoundly, in plain
sight. Those of us octogenarians are stuck in a nearly dead era which must feel
like prehistory to millennials. Be patient with us. We could hear what you can
only see.

Monday, March 5, 2018

By our illustrious president’s standards there were a
few winners and lots of losers at the Academy Awards ceremony last night. 80%
went home empty. Sad. All those crumbled papers with great speeches we’ll never
hear. I wonder what Meryl and Denzel had to say. I would imagine all the
nominees prepared something just in case. I’ll always remember Bob Hope’s quip
when he was Master of Ceremonies back in the day, Welcome to Oscar night or as we call it in our house, Passover.

Nobody wants to have their name called and get up
stammering, revealing their true inarticulate self, or even forgetting to
mention people who will never forgive him/her for the snub. With this in mind I
decided to write my brief acceptance speech which I have now recovered from the
trash bin.

I first want to thank Peggy without whom I would be
living in a cardboard box by the off-ramp reading back issues of National
Geographic stolen from my dentist’s office and eating my scant meals of freebie samplers at Costco. I want to
throw a kiss to my daughters, Janice, Lauren and Shari who were raised in spite
of me to be brilliant, creative and gifted Renaissance women. Now you should get to bed (even though you are all pushing sixty. A big shout-out to my extended progeny all of whom have wisdom by listening carefully to
my advice and doing exactly the opposite. I also want to mention my 3rd
grade teacher who cast me as the turkey in our Thanksgiving pageant which launched
my career on the stage. I should also give credit to that lady who let me in front of her on line at the checkstand with my head of lettuce and then
there was the time I had thirteen items in the 12-items-or-less line and also the guy
who held the door open for me in the elevator, I then bumped into and he
apologized and to the librarian who waived my overdue penalty.
Special thanks are also due to the meter-maid who alerted me, at 8:56, one Monday
morning, that I’d better move my car or be ticketed. I might also mention my
mother and father, long gone, who allowed me to go to the Saturday afternoon
movies where I spent the next five hours with my older brother even though my
feet didn’t reach the floor and I was in fear of being sat upon when a large
man inched his way across my row in the dark theater feeling his way and I saved my life from being crushed by rattling my Good and Plenty. And I’d be
remiss not to take this occasion to salute the Boys Scouts of America who threw
me out because I refused to tie the right knots thus demonstrating that I was
not suitable material to fight wars in defense of our flag. Yes, I know, I must wrap this up but, you see,
I don’t expect to be here again in this borrowed tux staring out at Spencer
Tracy and Katharine Hepburn or is that Audrey Hepburn... and Ingmar and Ingrid
Bergman and there’s Bogey…of all the gin joints, in all the towns in all the
world I walked into this….

Saturday, March 3, 2018

... what is a map but a useless prison? We are all so lost / no naming of blank
spaces can save us. / What is a map but the delusion of safety? / The line drawn is always in the sand and folds on itself / before we’re done making it... From poem, Maps by Yesenia Montilla

Borders come and they go. And that's not a bad thing. Migrations have been happening since we left Africa. However in more recent times wars are what changes the cartographers' ink.We started as a country of uninvited guests who never left and did away with their hosts. Some came shackled in chains, others came looking for change and were barely tolerated or ignored by an estimated 50 to 100 million Native Americans already living in North America for centuries.The prosperity or poverty of our continent can be seen in terms of European imperialism. America was an extension of the British Empire on the rise while Mexico was a function of a waning Spanish Empire. French and British enlightenment seeded us followed by migrations from Northern and Central Europe and later the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. To their detriment, the church in Mexico also played a large role allowing permanent residence only to Catholics until 1860.

Much has been said how America is stained by the
genocide of indigenous people and slavery. And rightly so. There is a third
leg to the stool which usually gets a short chapter in history books but is yet
another blight and one which embodies the other two, conquest and bondage. It is our first foreign
invasion which involved a sea blockade, amphibious landing and occupation of a
capital. Namely the Mexican War.

The map of the United States in 1836 was far different from the one of
1848. Our western edge was the Mississippi with states to the east and territories on the far side. As a result of the war we lost almost 20,000 men either through battle or
disease. Many of our troops were illiterate immigrants right off the boat. Several hundred Irish even deserted and fought with the Mexicans (St. Patrick's Battalion). Mexico had the will but neither the treasury nor military might to defend their northern territory. What we called Manifest Destiny was, to Mexico, manifestly
disastrous. President Polk's administration had as their destination the Pacific coast and all the land west of Ole Man River.The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ending the war not
only crippled Mexico but also extended slavery leading ultimately to the Civil
War. Mexico lost half its land as we grabbed over 525,000 square miles comprising California, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Texas, Utah, Nevada and parts of Oklahoma, Wyoming and Colorado. Another 300,000 sq. miles was added at the same time as Great Britain ceded the Oregon and Washington territories and parts of Montana and Idaho.

The treaty also guaranteed citizenship to Mexicans who had lived in those
territories we had gobbled up. In addition it was the beginning of the
end for the Indians. We assumed responsibility for their extinction or removal.

It could have been otherwise. The war with Mexico was
presided over by President Polk who was elected in 1844 by a mere 30,000 vote plurality.
New York Democrats swung the election by upsetting Henry Clay. The war with our
Southern neighbors was vehemently denounced by northern abolitionists such as Henry Thoreau whose essay on Civil Disobedience came out of his protest and brief incarceration over the issue. In addition Lincoln and John Quincy Adams spoke out against the invasion on the floor
of Congress. They both questioned the legitimacy of the conflict and excoriated
Polk for his lies and duplicity in provoking the conflict and inflating a small border skirmish into a full-fledged war and land-grab.This was probably the first of many such
pretenses. Think Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam and those imagined weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq. Anything to rally the troops.

There are no monuments in Washington to this national
shame. Generals Zach Taylor and Winfield Scott are not bronzed for pigeons to
shit upon. An inglorious war better forgotten.Our cross border aggression could be considered the genesis of our
immigration problem with Mexico. In a sense they are reclaiming their own stolen
land assured them 170 years ago.